SAOT honors promising and innovative research on photonics

Symbolic picture for the article. The link opens the image in a large view. — Prof. Stefan Will (left) and the President of FAU, Prof. Joachim Hornegger (right) bestow the SAOT Young Researcher Award 2022 on Samuel Grauer, PhD.Erich Malter Erlangen

11. July 2022

Since 2006, the Erlangen Graduate School in Advanced Optical Technologies (SAOT) acts as an interdisciplinary hub for research on photonics and optical technologies in Erlangen. With the Young Researcher Award (YRA) in Advanced Optical Technologies, SAOT honors young scientists for their outstanding research and provides funds for carrying out research at FAU and a guest professorship in Erlangen. At the award ceremony last Friday, July 8^th, this year’s YRA laureate, Samuel Grauer, PhD was honored with 100,000 Euros to realize his research proposal.

Almost 100 invited guests listened to Samuel Grauer, when he introduced his research plans last Friday evening. The award ceremony took place in the Rudolf-Wöhrl lecture hall at the University Hospital Erlangen. His project “Physics-Informed 4D Imaging of Turbulent Flows” will allow for insight into the complex dynamics of environmental and engineering flows like ocean currents, pollutant streams, and combustion processes. By combining time-resolved 3D absorption tomography with a physics-informed neuronal network for data analysis, he wants to close the gap between the information which can be measured by existing diagnostics and the information needed to characterize scalar mixing and reactive processes. During his stay in Erlangen, he will mainly collaborate with the Institute of Engineering Thermodynamics (LTT) and the Pattern Recognition Laboratory (LME), both located at the Faculty of Engineering at FAU.

Samuel Grauer, PhD, this year’s SAOT Young Researcher Award winner.

After a keynote lecture on the “Optical Investigation of Transcritical Interfaces”, held by Prof. Mark Linne from the University of Edinburgh, Samuel Grauer received the Young Researcher Award in Advanced Optical Technologies 2022 conferred by the President of FAU, Prof. Joachim Hornegger. “The Young Researcher Award stands for all what we want to promote and achieve by the graduate school. SAOT stands for excellence in research, training and education, as well as for internationality, interdisciplinarity, innovation and leadership”, as Prof. Stefan Will, Director and Co-Coordinator of SAOT, outlined in his welcome speech.

In addition, SAOT also honored four doctoral candidates from FAU for their latest scientific publications. This year’s Student Awards – comprising 1,000 Euros each – were conferred upon Lisa Ackermann, Dr. Yakun He, Dr. Marc-Oliver Pleinert, and Moritz Späth. Alexandra Popp received the SAOT Innovation Award for her proposal “Arbitrary pulse shaper based on localized light-sound interactions”. This award comes with a funding sum of 20,000 Euros and a personal prize money of 2,000 Euros.

The SAOT Student Award 2022 winners Moritz Späth (second from left), Lisa Ackermann (middle) and Dr. Marc-Oliver Pleinert (second from right) with Prof. Stefan Will (left) and the President of FAU, Prof. Joachim Hornegger (right).

As part of Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), SAOT provides an education program of excellence for national and international doctoral candidates, including workshops, seminars, and academies. Furthermore, SAOT increases the scientific outreach to the general public and coordinates joint applications on research funding in the fields of photonics and optical technologies.